Because the possibility that what
Russians classify as civic protests may grow into political ones, the views
expressed in these last two articles are especially worthy of being attended
to.

In the first, on the EurasiaNet
portal, Tatyana Timoshenko notes that for two months, Russians in the Moscow region
have been protesting about trash disposal and the authorities have been at a
loss of how to respond. As a result, these ecological protests are “shifting
into the political realm,” a development that does not bode well for the powers
that be.

The reasons for the crisis are not
hard to identify: The amount of trash in Russia has grown by 55 percent since
2006, most of it is not processed in a safe way, and officials in the Moscow
region for example now openly admit that they will run out of space to bury the
trash within the next three or four years. The situation elsewhere is almost as
bad.

And making the situation even worse
is the existence of numerous illegal dumps – some estimate there are as many as
60,000 of these – that don’t follow any rules at all but that appear to be in corrupt
cahoots with the powers that be in the regions in which they are located (gazeta.ru/comments/column/bovt/11679067.shtml).

But what has really set Russians off
is that people and especially children are suffering from runoff and the
release of poisonous gases from dump sites – and know more about this problem
given widespread distribution of the conclusions of the World Health
Organization that up to 50 percent of health problems in Russia are linked to
environmental contamination.

And in the second, URA.ru journalist
Marina Ivanova reports on the environmental factor as discussed in Minchenko
Consulting’s report concerning the probable growth of public protests in Russia
in the coming months and the way in which nominally “civic” actions are likely
to grow into “political” ones.

At present, the consulting company
says that “the high rating of the president and the long-standing crisis of the
opposition minimize electoral risks, but they do not defend the authorities
from spontaneous local protests” and the centralization of decision making mean
that what starts as a local action can become a national one.

The regional authorities, the report
says, “are not capable of dealing with the risks” because they do not have the
power to make decisions or the ability to interact with the population. Without
elections at the lower level, those in office are bureaucrats rather than
politicians.

As a result, the repot says, “Putin
is almost the only one who can speak with people ad deal with the de-escalation
of such conflicts” that may arise. But he can’t be everywhere and so problems
fester and grow, especially since most officials have little empathy for the
population and the protesters feel that intensely.

There are obvious correctives to
this situation, but the Kremlin isn’t prepared to take them because they would
involve more elections, more openness and a more flexible power arrangement
than Putin’s “power vertical” allows.And so both governors and Moscow are trying to control the situation by
suppressing information flows.

But that won’t work: as soon as one
set of channels is closed, people find another; and the experience of doing so
helps make them political even if they had no intention of moving in that
direction, Ivanova concludes.